Scheduling From the Perspective of the Application

Metacomputing is the aggregation of distributed and high-performance resources on coordinated networks. With careful scheduling, resource-intensive applications can be implemented efficiently on metacomputing systems at the sizes of interest to developers and users. In this paper, we focus on the problem of scheduling applications on metacomputing systems. We introduce the concept of application-centric scheduling in which every- thing about the system is evaluated in terms of its impact on the application. Application-centric scheduling is used by virtually all metacomputer programmers to achieve performance on metacomputing systems. We describe two successful metacomputing applications to illustrate this approach, and describe AppLeS scheduling agents which generalize the application-centric scheduling approach. Finally, we show preliminary results which compare AppLeS-derived schedules with conventional strip and blocked schedules for a two- dimensional Jacobi code. * This paper can be located on the World Wide Web at http://www-cse.ucsd.edu/users/berman/apples.html